Scientists discover link between climate change and phytoplankton biological evolution – Watts Up With That?
The discovery of the international team that tracks the astronomical rhythm of the Earth’s orbit
RUTGERS UNIVERSITY
CREDIT: CRIMINAL COURT OF DR. LUC BEAUFORT
New Brunswick, NJ (December 1, 2021) – Using artificial intelligence techniques, an international team including Rutgers-New Brunswick researchers tracked the evolution of coccolithophores, a group of plants plankton lived in the ocean, for more than 2.8 million years.
Their findings, published this week in the journal nature, reveal new evidence that evolutionary cycles in a group of marine phytoplankton are associated with changes in the tropical season, shedding light on the link between biological evolution and climate change.
Tubular bones are abundant single-celled organisms that surround them with microscopic plates made of calcium carbonate, known as broccoli. Because of their photosynthetic activity, mineral production, and widespread abundance throughout the world’s oceans, coccyx cells play an important role in the carbon cycle.
Scientists have long thought that the effects of climate change on plants, animals, and other organisms occur in cycles, which are reversed as each cycle completes, thus erasing any small evolutionary changes in each cycle. In contrast, evolutionary changes, known from the fossil record, are non-cyclical trends occurring over millions of years.
But the researchers’ new study suggests that evolutionary cycles in the nuclei are attributed to tropical seasonal changes linked to changes in Earth’s orbit that occur around 400,000 years ago. once. The study could also provide a new understanding of the approximately 400,000-year-old variations in the oceans’ carbon cycle records.
“The production of calcium carbonate by these prolific coastal organisms may influence seawater chemistry and the ocean’s carbon cycle, which in turn may cause significant consequences for Earth’s climate through the influence of oceans on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. -author Yair Rosenthal, a distinguished professor at Rutgers.
The researchers used AI techniques to study the shapes of nearly nine million broccoli from more than 8,000 samples, each representing a point in geologic time or space, tracking the evolution of the broccoli. coccolithophore for 2.8 million years. Samples taken from tropical sediment cores from the ocean floor were recovered during scientific drilling expeditions.
Automated optical microscopes took images, from which species were identified and their sizes and weights measured. These size and weight records suggest the presence of cycles lasting 100,000 years and 400,000 years, corresponding to a change in the shape of the Earth’s rotation around the sun, known as the magnitude. eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit. Unexpectedly, these cycles are not of the same length as those that followed the global climate and glacial cycles of the past 2.8 million years.
“Eccentricity cycles have many impacts on the earth,” said Luc Beaufort, lead author of the study. “One of the lesser-known effects is the periodic appearance of seasons at the equator. At the present time, when the Earth rotates in a nearly circular orbit, the equator undergoes very weak seasonal variation, but when the orbit is eccentric and shaped more like an ellipse than a circle, the change Seasonal changes in the tropics become stronger”.
This effect on tropical seasonality is different from the cause of seasonality at higher latitudes, driven primarily by the tilt of the earth’s axis of rotation.
“We modeled the effects of seasonal changes in eccentricity in the tropical ocean, demonstrating that the effects on marine ecosystems are is very important and may explain the adaptation of osteoclasts, co-authors of the study.
The study included researchers from Rutgers-New Brunswick in the United States and the Center for Research and Teaching in Environmental Geosciences (CEREGE) in France.
ABOUT RUTGERS — NEW BRUNSWICK
Rutgers University – New Brunswick is where Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, started more than 250 years ago. Ranked among the top 60 universities in the world, Rutgers flagship is a leading public research institution and a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities. It has an internationally acclaimed faculty, 12 degree schools and the Big Ten Conference’s most diverse student population.
JOURNEYS
nature
DOI
RESEARCH METHODS
Case study
RESEARCH SUBJECTS
Do not apply
ARTICLE TITLE
Cyclic evolution of phytoplankton due to tropical season variation
ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE
December 1, 2021
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